Installing pagespeed

Question

I'm fairly new to web design and after months of creating a website i'm almost ready to launch, when studying SEO I stumbled upon Google Pagespeed. I've signed up and changed my DNS to point to googles address and when I view my .css files using page source I can see that they are hosted at the pagespeed address.

My question is that I've read alot of info on Google Pagespeed site about installing onto apache server etc. and using commands to control certain elements such as rewriting the cache and javascript, but i've not installed anything and I don't know how to use SSH Commands to control Apache. (I do know I have SSH enabled on my host)

I'm self taught so my knowledge is fairly limited at the moment, but what would I use to install Pagespeed onto my server and do i need to? If so do i download software (puTTY?) to so this or can I send these commands from cPanel? I've searched for days on the web and I can't seem to find an answer.

Any pointers would be greatly appreciated and apologies again for the noob question!

Cheers

Chris

Answer 1

It sounds like you are getting Google's PageSpeed Service confused with mod_pagespeed. Both are tools to optimize your website, but mod_pagespeed runs on your origin server, while PageSpeed Service proxies your site through Google's network and runs the optimizations on their servers. To use PageSpeed Service you modify your DNS settings to point to Google's servers. If you modified your DNS settings already, it sounds like this is what you have setup currently. Both PageSpeed Service and mod_pagespeed have a similar set of optimizations though, so it's not necessary, or even recommended, to configure both.